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Obama’s Remade Inner Circle Has an All-Male Look, So Far

President Obama on Dec. 29 with senior advisers in the Oval Office. The only woman facing the president was (look very closely) Valerie Jarrett, whose leg is just visible in front of the desk.Credit
Pete Souza/The White House

WASHINGTON — In an Oval Office meeting on Dec. 29, 11 of President Obama’s top advisers stood before him discussing the heated fiscal negotiations. The 10 visible in a White House photo are men.

In the days since, Mr. Obama has put together a national security team dominated by men, with Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts nominated to succeed Hillary Rodham Clinton as the secretary of state, Chuck Hagel chosen to be the defense secretary and John O. Brennan nominated as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Given the leading contenders for other top jobs, including chief of staff and Treasury secretary, Mr. Obama’s inner circle will continue to be dominated by men well into his second term.

From the White House down the ranks, the Obama administration has compiled a broad appointment record that has significantly exceeded the Bush administration in appointing women but has done no better than the Clinton administration, according to an analysis of personnel data by The New York Times. About 43 percent of Mr. Obama’s appointees have been women, about the same proportion as in the Clinton administration, but up from the roughly one-third appointed by George W. Bush.

The skew was widespread: male appointees under Mr. Obama outnumbered female appointees at 11 of the 15 federal departments, for instance. In some cases, the skew was also deep. At the Departments of Justice, Defense, Veterans Affairs and Energy, male appointees outnumbered female appointees by about two to one.

“We’re not only getting better than previous administrations, but we also want to get better ourselves as well,” Nancy D. Hogan, assistant to the president and director of presidential personnel, said in response to the Times analysis. “The president puts a premium on making his team representative of the American people.”

The White House itself employs almost exactly the same number of men and women, and administration officials said they hoped to even out the ratio across the government and help ensure that future Democratic administrations have a diverse and deep bench of candidates for high-level jobs.

But Mr. Obama’s recent nominations raised concern that women were being underrepresented at the highest level of government and would be passed over for top positions.

For instance, many Democrats had hoped that Mr. Obama would name Michèle Flournoy, a former under secretary of defense, to the Pentagon post. They had also hoped that he might name Alyssa Mastromonaco or Nancy-Ann M. DeParle, who are top White House aides, to the chief of staff job, or Lael Brainard, an under secretary at the Treasury Department, as secretary. But speculation about the chief of staff position now rests on Denis McDonough, the deputy national security adviser, and Ronald A. Klain, a former chief of staff to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. For the Treasury position, most expect Mr. Obama to name his current chief of staff, Jacob J. Lew.

“It’s not so much about checking a box, like on a census form,” said Tracy Sefl, a Democratic political consultant in Washington. “It’s about the qualitative properties that the candidate takes to the position. In this case you’re talking about tremendous women, and then we get a whole bunch more white guys.”

Interviews with current and former members of the administration, both men and women, suggested that there was no single reason for the gender discrepancy in administration appointments, and several repeatedly spoke of the administration’s internal commitment to diversity and gender equity.

But several said that the “pipeline” of candidates appeared to be one problem. They said it seemed that more men than women were put forward or put their names forward for jobs. In part, that might be a result of the persistence of historical discrepancies: men have traditionally dominated government fields like finance, security and defense.

The Obama administration has helped reverse that trend by putting women in top policy-making jobs in traditionally male-dominated fields, officials said. “It makes a huge difference when you have women who are leaders,” said Celeste A. Wallander, who was a deputy assistant defense secretary until July. “They tend to have networks of excellent women they can call on.”

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In many areas of government, the Obama administration has brought the gender ratio much closer to even than the Bush administration. At the Treasury Department, which has a longstanding reputation as a boys’ club, men made up about 57 percent of appointees, down from 64 percent during the Bush administration as of 2008 and 60 percent in the Clinton administration as of 2000. Moreover, women now hold some of the top policy-making jobs in the Treasury Department, including Ms. Brainard, the country’s top financial diplomat, and Mary J. Miller, the under secretary for domestic finance.

But experts on the representation of women in government and business said that the White House had more work to do to ensure that women were more equally represented, including changing the work conditions within the administration. “It is not just a pipeline issue,” said Marie C. Wilson, a women’s leadership advocate who is the founder of the White House Project, a New York-based nonprofit group. “The pipeline in government has loads of talented people in it, and loads of talented women.”

She noted that women with young families, more so than men with young families, tended to drop out of jobs that demanded long hours — a trend also noted by administration officials. Perhaps as evidence of that skew, there were about 57 percent more male appointees than female appointees at the assistant or deputy assistant level.

Experts said that family-friendly policies, like paid maternity and paternity leave, might keep more women in administration jobs. “We’re the only industrialized nation in the world with no mandatory paid leave,” said Victoria A. Budson, the executive director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard. “This is about creating a better system of labor throughout the course of a person’s career.”

The Times performed a data analysis of the Plum Book, a government listing of political appointees that comes out once every four years. The 2012 version included about 4,000 named staff members appointed by the administration as of June, and excluded members of the career Civil Service and certain security-sensitive positions. Still, it provides a mostly comprehensive view of the Obama administration, from the Defense Department to the tiny Arctic Research Commission.

An analysis of a separate pool of federal personnel data found that the number of high-level female political appointees outside the White House was about the same under Mr. Clinton and Mr. Obama, though it fell under Mr. Bush. Women held about 35 percent of those positions, like assistant secretary, in 2011 and 1999. Women held about 25 percent in 2007. The Clinton administration named significantly more women to political appointments than prior administrations, about 44 percent over all.

Though the percentage of women in the last two Democratic administrations has held roughly steady, there are a record number of women in Congress this year: 20 in the Senate and 81 in the House.

Kitty Bennett, Derek Willis and Sarah Cohen contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on January 9, 2013, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama’s Remade Inner Circle Has an All-Male Look, So Far. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe